Field
The disclosed embodiments generally relate to cloud computing systems. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to the design of a system that facilitates communications between virtual private clouds (VPCs) hosted by different cloud service providers.
Related Art
As the Internet continues to evolve, organizations are beginning to move much of their computing infrastructure onto third-party cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services™ (AWS) and the Google Cloud Platform™ (GCP). Moving computational resources onto third-party cloud platforms provides a number of advantages. Such cloud platforms enable cloud computing resources to be rapidly provisioned with relatively minimal management effort. This allows organizations to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance. Moreover, cloud computing platforms enable organizations to rapidly adjust the size of their pool of computational resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demands.
Large organizations often make use of multiple cloud platforms, which are operated by different companies, to host different computational resources. This is because a large organization may have a number of different business units, and different cloud platforms may be better suited to handle the different requirements for the different business units. Also, using multiple cloud platforms increases redundancy, and can thereby ensure against situations where an individual cloud platform fails.
However, using multiple cloud platforms creates a number of challenges. In particular, in order to provide an acceptable level of performance, it is desirable to provide “full mesh connectivity” between various computational resources in an organization. This can be a challenge because it is often hard to establish direct links between computational resources hosted on different cloud platforms. Note that the process of setting up such direct links between cloud platforms is presently performed through a time-consuming manual process.
Hence, what is needed is a technique for facilitating the establishment of direct links between computational resources hosted by different cloud providers.